Author's page

András IMREH
( 1966 )

Biography

1966 born in Budapest
1985-1990 graduates in Law from Eötvös Loránd University Law School in Budapest
1985-1990 graduates in Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University
1990-2001 language teacher
1994 obtains teaching certificate at the International House, Budapest
2001-2002 editor for the English section of the literary periodical, Nagyvilág
2002-present freelance translator

András Imreh translates from English, French and Spanish, and by the time his “so-called first, but indeed selected volume” was published (to quote his fellow-poet János Lackfi), he had long had a firm grip on the difficulties of the craft and had found his own voice. His view of things evokes both the telescope and the microscope, at once distinguishing distant detail and, constantly changing proportions, showing an inclination towards the grotesque. Imreh often uses the method of joining disparate elements of sight or reality, at other times of language.
“In his poems, grotesque elements may get a sudden tragic undertone, for instance an old man’s meticulous activity in an autumn garden, when the smell of the decaying vegetation is mixed with that of the perishable human body (‘Old Man in an Autumn Garden’), or the messy dishes inside the dishwasher, when all of a sudden they evoke the image of naked soldiers dying of heatstroke in a tank (‘My Mother Is Using the Dish-washer’). ‘The Blackbird’ is at once biological and metaphysical, ‘The Sugar Bowl’ is colloquial and historical, and ‘Why Do I Love That Building?’ is sceptical and passionate. The crudely material world of ‘Zoo’ becomes ethereal, and in the airy framework of ‘Negative Relationships’ suddenly there is a human body,”
-fellow poet Szabolcs Várady
“It is a mystery how a poetic text can be so detailed, analytic and dissecting and at once so full of life. Every single thrust of these sometimes reduced, sometimes magnified models lives a life of its own, yet they are held together by such a strong force that we keep wandering between the details and the...question of which one we should pay more attention to.”
-fellow poet János Lackfi